


Trees

by BlueMoonHound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Major Character Injury, lil bit of dissociation, nonsexual nakedness, self-hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 11:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14692962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: Something about their jobs makes them feel useless, anyway. The least the two of them can do is use the feet they have. Sometimes, the weight of their situation is too much to carry.





	Trees

Lucretia sees the tree break just in time for her to yell before it hits Taako in the back. It hits him anyway, and Lucretia swears aloud, waiting a panicked moment before rushing forward.

“Taako?” she crouches down next to his head, where his hair fell splayed all over the ground. She swallows. He's not responding, and she's pretty sure he's unconscious. She feels his pulse and – She didn't think he would die from something like that, he definitely didn't. Thank goodness.

Lucretia sits down next to the tree for a minute to let her heartbeat calm and assess the situation. The sky is starting to darken. They were going to look for a place to camp soon. They're surveying the area for just, any sign of the light and they haven't found anything yet.

That saying, they're nearly a full day's walk from the ship now. She doubts if it's even a good idea to move Taako – if she can manage to get him out from under the tree, which she guesses she might. She wonders if Taako hit his head hard enough to knock himself out, or if it was the pain. Neither are particularly pleasant options.

She assesses the tree. That she can probably move at least a few feet-- it's going to be heavy, but she doesn't have to do all the work herself, since she only has to get part of it off the ground to move it off of Taako. Lucretia chews her lip and stands up. Would have been better for this to have happened earlier in the day if it had to happen at all- she wouldn't be so tired then. But then again, no accident like this is a planned thing and the universe's metaphorical dice don't roll partially. The other thing to note is – she can probably lift the tree, for sure, but if she drops it on Taako's head that's infinitely worse than its current state on Taako's back, so she needs to be sure she can carry it a full foot to the left before she decides to move it at all.

Lucretia straddles the tree and tries lifting it with both arms, bending her knees. It's just wider than the entire width of her torso but she manages to get it enough off the ground that she can get it over Taako's head. She inches to the left until she's past Taako's crown and relaxes just a little, accidentally dropping it on his hair.

Whoops.

She clambers over and turns Taako to face up as best she can with his hair still caught under the tree. He has a few cuts on his face and arms, and when she peels back his shirt there's no sign of an open fracture, though his ribs are definitely broken. He's breathing alright. His heart is still beating. She shimmies her legs under his head and leans against the log.

What next, she wonders, swallowing around the lump in her throat. Uhm. Stone. Call the crew. She can do that. She digs her stone out of her bag and dials Davenport.

“Hello?” Davenport's voice is gravelly over the bad connection.

“Hello captain,” Lucretia says. “I doubt we're going to be able to walk back to the ship. Taako's ah, injured.”

“How injured?”

“It's definitely surviveable, at least from what I can see-- cuts and scrapes, some broken ribs, but. He's not awake and there might be-- more. More... wrong.”

“Did you find hostile entities?”

“No,” Lucretia giggles. “No, a tree, uh, a tree fell.”

Davenport registers her hysteria. “Calm down. We'll be right out. Where are you?”

She takes a deep breath. “Right, yes. On the… the side of the mountain? I know it's hard to track a stone when it's off but that might be easier. Sorry. I'll update you if his condition worsens or if he… if he dies.”

“Talk to you later, Maryam.”  
“Bye.”

She listens to Davenport hang up and stares at her stone for a few minutes before coming to her senses and digging out bandages for Taako's arms and face.

He wakes up while Lucretia's finishing cleaning a cut on his arm with water from her waterskin and a little bit of alcohol which she probably shouldn't have snuck on a hiking trip. He blinks at her, lips just a little parted, like he's not entirely sure what's going on. She rolls the bandage around his arm and he winces just a little, blinking.

“The fuck happened, Luce?”

“A tree fell on you,” Lucretia says.

“Well that's dumb,” Taako mumbles. His eyes start to drift closed.

“Hey. Taako.” She snaps in his face and his eyes flutter wide open again. “Stay awake. I don't know if you have a concussion or not.”

“Oh.” Taako's ears flick against her legs and belly like he wants to lower them but doesn't quite have the energy to do so. “Yeah, okay.”

“I already called the ship, we don't have to worry about that.”

“Uhuh. Yeah.” Taako tries to sit up and winces when both his hair and his ribs protest. “Ow.” He takes a few shallow breaths and groans again. “My hair is stuck.”

“If you think you can get it out from under the tree yourself I think I can lift it again.”  
“Yeah.”

Lucretia wiggles back out from under him and steps back to the tree. “On three. One, two--”

She lifts the tree as best she can, and Taako uses a hand to sweep his hair out from under, getting an awful lot of dirt in it in the process. She drops the log with a loud thud.

“Ow,” Taako reiterates. “Can I just, lie here? For a bit?”

“I was thinking it might be kinder to the crew to try to move a little further north, but if you're struggling to stay conscious we probably shouldn't.”

“No, I'm okay,” Taako grumbles, trying to sit up again, slower this time, and inching back til he's leaning against the tree. “Oof.”

“I'll see if I can find an open area nearby,” Lucretia says.

“Okay,” Taako mumbles, sipping some water. His face doesn't betray any particular emotion for or against this movement, but his ears drop a little.

“I'll be right back.”

“I know.”

She spares him one more glance before wandering up the hill. She can guess why Taako doesn't particularly want to be left alone in a wood while injured. He's told her about all the times that he and Lup had to run for their lives from various assailants and even law enforcement as children – never in much detail, but he's told her. This isn't a world like that, though. The only semisentient life lives on other continents, and they're humanoid creatures who haven't progressed much beyond drawing on stone walls. There aren't any magical species whatsoever in this plane.

Lucretia knows the likelihood of two trees falling on them in the wood is pretty slim, but she's excessively careful on her way up anyway, because once something happens it's hard to take the image of it out of one's mind. She breathes a sigh of relief when she reaches an open rock surface a little further up, not much of a lookout but large enough that if they sit in the middle of it they'll be plainly visible. She works her way down the mountain and back to where Taako is, cataloging her locations as she goes.

Taako is sitting up very straight, staring off into space. At first, it looks like he's looking at something, but then she realizes that's just the most comfortable position for him to sit in with broken ribs, and he's drifting.

“Taako?”

“Mm?”

“I found a spot. Are you sure you can walk?”

Taako half-shrugs and fails to get to his feet, holding out a hand. “Help?”

He proceeds to complain loudly as she helps him to his feet.

It's slow going. The sun sets completely before they reach the rock surface Lucretia had found before.

“How soon will they be here?” Taako asks, staring at a passing cloud.

“I don't know.”

“That's sucky.”

“Yeah.”

“This mission was a bust anyway.”

Lucretia laughs. All it took was one falling tree for their entire, plane-vital trip to be called off. Granted, it wasn't the best choice to send the cook and the writer on a trip alone together, but everyone else was already out when they left.

Something about their jobs makes them feel useless, anyway. The least the two of them can do is use the feet they have. Sometimes, the weight of their situation is too much to carry.

On bad nights, Taako jokes about how little he'd be missed if he died. The first couple of times, she had called Lup, still unsure of how to interact with Taako when he's distressed and pretending not to be. Before long she understood the feeling. She'd been there. Sometimes, it's best to let it out. She's sure it's not just them, either, since none of the crew are perfect. Even Barry, multiclassed to hell and back, probably got that way because of his own fears.

Slowly but surely, the cycles are getting to them. Their own incompetence is magnified by the dark, still clouds that hang heavy over a plane only hours before it is devoured.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

“Nothing.”  
Taako shifts. “Nah, you're thinking about something. You look all sad. C'mon, Lucy-lu, tell me.”

“Just mortality, I guess.”

“We don't have any of that anymore.”

“Exactly, I.” She shrugs. “I feel limited despite my inability to cease. Taako, I lost to a fucking tree today.”

“Exceyuuuse you, _I_ lost to a tree, not you. You made it out completely unscathed.”

“I'm an abjuration wizard. I should be faster to protect people.”

“I am, I should, blah blah. I'm a cook, Lucy. I shouldn't burn my hands on empty pans on accident. I set the 'Blaster kitchen on fire once, remember?” He shrugs, wincing. “I'm a cook. I can turn bombs into water. You're an abjuration wizard. You can write with both hands at the same time.”

“True,” Lucretia says. The reassurances feel hollow. The night has sat long enough for the air to chill, and she wiggles closer to Taako in hopes of garnering a little more warmth.

“I wonder if any of my internal organs are bleeding,” Taako mumbles.

“I hope not.”

The night sinks around them. Lucretia finds herself staring at Taako's eyeshine, the way the light of the single moon in the sky reflects against his eyes. They look yellow rather than golden in this light. A falcon of some kind calls in the distance. Something rustles in a bush.

A length of time passes, somewhere in the range of minutes to hours, before the familiar sound of the Starblaster's engines roars overhead. Lucretia stands up on shaky legs and casts Light on her hand, waving it around in the air. It only takes a few minutes for a ladder to drop in front of them, Magnus scrambling down.

Taako gets himself into the ship just fine with Levitate. Lucretia watches.

“Come on, Lucy, aren't you coming?”Magnus hangs off the ladder, staring down at her.

“I thought I wasn't,” she says. She knows she wouldn't last very long in the wilderness by herself just by virtue of being by herself in a foreign environment, but she doesn't want to let the team down. “I should set up my bedroll before it gets colder.”

“No, come on, you've been sitting on that bedrock for a few hours. We've got coffee and blankets in the ship.” Magnus pouts.

“I need to find the light.”  
“Lup triangulated it last night. There's no point in looking on the ground anymore.”

Oh. Lucretia shivers, rooted in her own failure. “Oh,” she repeats aloud, a little far away all of a sudden. She climbs the ladder. Taako's already healed by the time she gets inside. He's talking. She can't hear what he's saying.

That's okay. He'll tell her later. She wanders in the direction of the bathroom, feeling gross.

 

Taako joins her in the shower five minutes later.

“Lucy, you okay?”

Lucretia sighs into the spray, then turns to watch the shadow of Taako strip down on the other side of the translucent shower curtain. “I'm fine. It's not as if that was particularly traumatic.”

“No, but it put you in a downswing.”

She almost denies it, but that's absurd. “Yeah,” she sighs. She finishes soaping down and rinses off as Taako enters the shower stall, reaching for the shampoo.

“Bed after this? Healin' like that always makes me super tired.”

“Sure,” she says.

Lucretia dries off in front of the mirror, listening to Taako's exclamations of relief as he works dirt out of his hair. The biggest cut on his arm scarred, despite her and Merle's best efforts. She puts on her pajamas and finds a cup of coffee waiting for her on the counter when she goes to look. It's still warm.

“Trees, huh?” Taako says when she slides under the covers, his head landing in her lap.

“Yeah,” She says, without much feeling.

It hasn't even been that unusual of a day, today. In any other cycle this sort of thing could be expected. That's why the ship has a healer. Well, not really: the healer was initially for emergencies. But if she were back in the little town she grew up in, this would be far from normal.

When did this become normal?

She tracks back through the cycles, but she can't answer her own question.

**Author's Note:**

> I needed to write something different for a little bit. Idk.   
> Been thinking about how normalizing a lot of a bad thing can hurt u in the long run.... a century of being used to every year just ending, things being treacherous all the time... gods, i dont know.


End file.
